Tragedy survivors come up trumps in national exams

BRITAIN: A Grenfell Tower survivor who fled her home with just her phone and GCSE chemistry revision notes is celebrating achieving an A in the subject.

Ines Alves, 16, was praised by teachers at Sacred Heart High School, Hammersmith, for her ‘‘fantastic’’ results.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph yesterday, Ines, who gained A*s, As and equivalent top grades in maths, Spanish and the sciences, said that ‘‘it just goes to show that if you really want something you can get it’’.

‘‘The school has been really good, really supportive,’’ she added. ‘‘I’m quite happy with my grades. I wasn’t expecting to get attention for just sitting a GCSE (General Certificate in Secondary Education) exam, as everyone else did. At the time I just thought it was normal. I was on two hours’ sleep and I had just witnessed my house burning down. But it hadn’t sunk in. Occasionally it popped into my head, [but] I just tried to get distracted by the exam questions.’’

Marian Doyle, the headmistress at Sacred Heart School, said that Ines had been a ‘‘fantastic’’ pupil and that she ‘‘can’t help smiling’’ at her results. Ines’ grade nine in maths places her in the top 3.5 per cent of students in the country. She is to begin A-levels in maths, chemistry, economics and sociology next month.

Ines lived on the 13th floor of the Grenfell Tower with her parents and her brother, Tiago, who studies physics at King’s College London. The family have been living in a hotel since the fire, in which they lost everything they owned, including family photos and gold jewellery from the children’s christenings and holy communions. ’’We were very upset in the beginning about losing everything, but now we understand we’re never going to get it back, so we just have to live with that.’’

However, she said the idea of never returning to her childhood home still seems surreal. ‘‘I’ve lived there since I was born,’’ she said. ‘‘Each and every floor was different and multicultural. It’s where I was brought up. It still hasn’t really hit me that I’m never going to be able to go home.’’

Meanwhile, the sister

"I was on two hours' sleep and I had just witnessed my house burning down. But it hadn't sunk in. Occasionally it popped into my head, [but] I just tried to get distracted by the exam questions." Ines Alves

of a Manchester bombing victim has received top grades in her GCSEs, despite taking one exam the day after her brother was confirmed dead.

Nikita Murray, who picked up her results from Stockport Grammar School yesterday, said her brother, Martyn Hett, would have been ‘‘proud’’ of her 11 A* IGCSE grades. She said that she had been revising for her physics exam as her family waited for news of Martyn after the terror attack on May 22.

‘‘I was just thinking that I should probably revise just in case we found him. The option of not taking the exam was in my brain,’’ she said. Nikita’s father, Stuart Murray, said her results were ‘‘an amazing story of resilience meeting evil and adversity’’.

Another teenager injured in the bombing, Laura Anderson, 15, from Co Durham, achieved a grade 7 in her English language exam which she took while recovering from her wounds.

- Telegraph Group